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Hi, I'm Keith Horvath. I'm the director of cardiothoracic surgical research here at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
And one of our projects was to look at new and better ways to implant heart valves.
We've come a long way with being able to help patients, not only in replacing their valves but also in being able to repair them.
What we needed to do was to come up with new ways of implanting these valves
that would be even less traumatic without sacrificing the durability,
without doing away with the key components of those devices.
And one way we determined that may benefit patients was to use different imaging.
A lot of surgery is dependent on what the surgeon can see and what he can reach with his own hands.
Now if they use different imaging, a different set of eyes, they could look inside the body and tell us what the anatomy is,
and determine precisely where that valve needs to be placed and correctly implanted.
We'd have a groundbreaking approach to further carry the benefits that we've seen with heart valve surgery.
And we've done that with the use of MRI. Specifically related to the aortic valve.
Using real-time imaging so the surgeon is actually looking at the MRI images on a projector screen,
he can see exactly where he needs to place that new valve in an absolutely minimally invasive approach –
an incision that's less than two inches – and in a tenth of the time,
literally 70 to 90 seconds to implant one of these valves as opposed to several hours in an open procedure.
And I'm proud that we've been able to not only move the field forward but also be able to do it here,
at the NIH, and in the NHLBI.